Life is full of choices, but some require us to ‘come before winter’

By David McElroy · December 30, 2011

Where were you a year ago? As 2010 was drawing to a close and 2011 stretched out before you, what did you expect the new year to bring? Have your hopes been met? Or have you been disappointed instead?

The end of the year is always a time of introspection for me. I know the new year is an arbitrary thing that doesn’t mean anything other than what we bring to it, but I still end up thinking a lot about the year I’ve just been through and the year that’s about to start. I evaluate what I wanted from the year just ending and I think hard about what I want from the new one.

This thinking can leave me emotional and introspective, so I’ve been feeling a lot of things strongly this week. I’m impatient about some things. I’m angry at myself about others. I’m determined and focused about yet other things. I’m happier with where I am today than I was a year ago, even though I didn’t make as much progress as I’d hoped.

Every year, the slate is wiped clean and we get a new year, but that doesn’t mean we can wait forever to start the things that matter. We have choices about what to do with each year. If you spend a year wisely, you can build something else on top of that year in the years after that. But if you squander the years — and never start moving toward being the person you need to be or toward doing the things you need to do — you reach a point at which some doors start closing.

There’s a famous line in the last letter we have that the apostle Paul wrote. When Paul wrote his second letter to Timothy, he was in prison and might have been just weeks from his death. We don’t know the details. What we do know is that he speaks to Timothy of many things, but closes with personal instructions and requests (in the fourth chapter):

“Do your best to come to me soon. … Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry. … When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments. … Do your best to come before winter.”

Winter was a time when it was difficult to travel in those days, so Paul knew it was important for Timothy to come quickly. More importantly, he had already been brought before a court and he must have sensed that the end of his life was coming.

We face many possibilities in life. When we’re at the beginning of a year, they can all see fresh and new as the new year stretches out ahead of us. But with some things, winter can come for opportunities and possibilities. If you delay taking a path for too long, the passage of too much time can mean that winter arrives and blocks your path. We all need to consider carefully what we really want — and what we feel in our spirits that we’re called to do — and we need to weigh Paul’s advice to Timothy. We need to “come before winter” if we’re going to come at all.

For me, I’ve wasted more time than I’d care to admit. Many of my years haven’t mattered. Many of my opportunities have been squandered. Some of the possibilities are lost.

But as I face the new year, I know that I’ve at least started working toward some things that matter, confident that God is sovereign and that past mistakes can be overcome. I started hoping — and believing — for unseen things at about this time last year. I haven’t achieved all I wanted to achieve, but I’m confident that I’m doing the right things — putting one foot in front of the other and trusting that things are slowly working as they should.

A year from now, I know I’ll be back here — in the metaphorical sense — evaluating what I did with 2012. I hope I can be proud of the progress I’ve made by then. I hope I can like the person I am better by then. And I hope I can be making more of a difference for people around me by then.

When spring is here, the world feels full of unlimited possibilities. In the summer, it still feels as though you have forever to take advantage of opportunities. By fall, you realize that you have no more time to waste. It’s time to become the person you need to be — with no more wasted time. That’s what I’m trying to do.

I slept through much of my spring and summer, but I’m wide awake now. I’m trying really hard to come to my intended place in life before winter. I don’t know whether Timothy was able to visit Paul before his death. I assume he didn’t make it in time. But I know that opportunities are open to me right now. I intend to take them before winter comes.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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